


Imagination Is The Key

by vashiane



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Spirits, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Gen, M/M, Prompt Jar Challenge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-15 22:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3465032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vashiane/pseuds/vashiane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is but a jar of words scrawled on torn-out pages, but I have the power to make them something beautiful. </p><p>So I'll try.</p><p>[prompt jar challenge]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cacoethes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avoidingavoidance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avoidingavoidance/gifts).



> So. avoidingavoidance had this BRILLIANT idea of taking words, writing down the word and the definition on a piece of paper and then folding tem up like stars. You stick your hand in you later, open up a star, and write a drabble about it!  
> Well after much flailing on Twitter and about 200 collected words later, here I am. I have yet to actually fold mine and my "jar" is a novelty light up cup my dad got from a bar but  
> You gotta start somewhere, right?
> 
> ANYWAY. Actually realized I didn't state what was going on here and I should probably do that. 
> 
> I have an entire notebook filled to the brim with AUs and headcanons and I'm using this as a way to deal with those random surges of writing inspiration that distract me from what I should ACTUALLY be writing. So. I'll state in the chapter notes which AU each drabble is from for organization's sake, because over 200 words and 50 AUs means I'm going to be a repeating a bit. 
> 
> Think I've covered everything now. Okay, good!
> 
> Starting off this AU adventure with the inFamous AU.  
> God I love inFamous.

**cacoethes**  
noun

_an irresistible urge to do something inadvisable._

* * *

 

She now has a choice.

She can kill him, or she could let him live.

If he dies, the panic that will ensue will engulf the entire room. The tension will explode, a mushroom cloud of repressed emotions and this sort of chaos cannot be controlled. Chairs and tables will be overturned with screams. Frantic babblings that _"he's dead, he's dead, he's dead and SHE killed him"_ will rise through the frenzy until every person is a radio tower, bouncing the message from one to the other again and again and again. Someone will be brave enough to climb up onto the stage and try to restrain her, or maybe even reason with her, but this isn't something that can be negotiated. He either is, or he isn't. And he is, so her accoster would have to die too. With two dead civilians to her name now, she could turn on the crowd now if she wants. She's already outted herself. If they're all dead no one can stop her from grabbing Marco and /running/. She could rain pretty shards of pale green glass and stain white linoleum red.  List herself as Public Enemy #1, with a body count that would make hardened criminals balk, become the thing the government's been so horribly afraid of.

She could be infamous.

Or she could be rational, like she's always been. Irrationality and Mina L. Carolina have never mixed and for good reason - the cocktail it makes is toxic. She could drop the spiral of glass she's surrounded him in, let it shatter. Pull away and continue to say, " _I'm_ the Conduit. I'm the seventh person on that list. I am," even though she's not. She is a Conduit, been one since the tender age of eight and for nine long years it had been her best-kept secret. So well kept even she forgot the truth; and if she can lie so well to herself she could lie to anyone else. 

It nags her, however, the reminder that she's been saying this and nothing else ever since the paper was snatched from her hands. And that the spark of defiance is still in his eyes, even brighter now than before, and it's with a plummeting feeling she realizes he will not believe her. Not while he knows the truth, while it sits on his tongue just waiting for the perfect moment to be yelled to the world. 

It's ironic, in a way. Marco's mother always said Conduits lived lives like sparklers. Bright, hot, and wild until they were burned out, either by themselves or the government gunning them down. Here she stands, on this auditorium stage with the sparklers for her life and Marco's lit and flinging fire for now - but they'll be burned out or snuffed out, and it's not a matter of if, but when.

She isn't going to live very long anymore - whatever life expectancy she had before has been cut in half (if she's lucky) - but this, to surrender at the age of seventeen and surrender her stepbrother at eighteen because Thomas Wagner won't let something die...

She won't have it.

So into the mixing glass the cocktail goes, and she pours it into Thomas, serves it with a pale green spike and it's a cocktail so potent it goes right through him.

(Though the chaos, she catches a glimpse of Marco hiding behind a row of chairs. She remembers not to hit him when she brings the glass shards down.)


	2. previse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That feel when your prompts are only supposed to be about 1000 words tops and you hit 2300.  
> I am a disappointment and I apologize.
> 
> I... don't have a name for this AU.  
> It's a strange one.  
> I'll explain further down though.

**previse**  
verb

to foresee or predict (an event).

* * *

 

There’s very little he doesn’t see, and if his eyes miss something, disaster usually follows.

It’s how things have always been. He watches, he waits, he does not touch - but his eyes aren’t perfect, and he isn’t going to catch everything.

There are things that are older than he is, skilled in the art of bending reality around him so his gaze skips them over. It registers as a glitch - maybe the world is breaking, maybe he’s growing too old. Maybe he’s tired, and that thought always leaves him shaking his head and smiling, because it’s anything but that. It’s a silly thought to no one but himself, but it’s alright. He’s got time to be a little silly.

It’s the day he notices something that he’s never seen before where the joke loses its luster, when his eyes catch on a head of hair the color of straw framed about a gentle, heart-shaped face.

He’s supposed to watch everything but he’s _snared_ , staring, drinking in the way the person moves their hands as they talk. Lost in the way they laugh, in the soft chime of it, and the shy way they hide their smile behind shaking hands. There’s a group of them, teenagers probably, and while he gets little glimpses of the others - _one with hair like black silk covered in loneliness_ ; _one with piercing green eyes and a deceptive grin_ \- he finds himself looking back, again and again, waiting for the information to wash over him slowly. Little pieces, like thoughts that float to the surface and things embedded in their soul.

But he reads nothing.

Or rather, nothing comes.

In an hour’s time he could write a novella on the companions. But not this one, whose existance is so quiet it’s almost as if they don’t.

But they do, don’t they? They laugh, smile, whisper, breathe. He stares at straw-colored hair spun gold in the afternoon sunlight and they are certainly alive, but why can’t he read them?

Someone he can’t read is someone he can’t observe, and something he can’t observe leads to disaster.

He settles in his chair. Sighs. And hopes for an exception.

* * *

He learns, but not through the person themselves, but from around them.

They are a he. His name is Armin. He’s known his companions for years, they say, but they have trouble with their childhood memories, only remembering through Armin’s prompting. The green-eyed one is Eren, and the one he’s known the longest (as he says). The girl with hair of black silk entered later, but is just as important (as he says). Armin is eighteen. He loves the stars, but the ocean even more. The ocean he could talk about for days, only stopping when he has to and starting right up again when he can.

But that’s the thing. He knows more about Armin’s love for the sea than Armin himself, and it scares him.

He knows enough to fill a postcard, maybe, and that amount of information does not a person make.

Maybe, like some of the shadows lingering from the older days, he’ll simply vanish. The world will be right again. He can breathe a bit easier and not turn his attention away with a feeling of dread. He tells himself this, and maybe the thought of Armin being gone will no longer hurt.

Why does it? He’s watched people die. He remembers a boy, brilliant and bright, who he watched grow and flourish only to be cut down before he had a time to bloom. Still to this day he remembers, only seen because of a gaze flicked a little too far to the left. He mourns the deaths he notices quietly, but that day he mourned loudly, and swore to himself he’d never grow so attached again.

It’s only been a hundred -or-so years, and he’s already eaten his words.

Once again, he toils, gaze constantly flickering to the point where he knows Armin stays, pretending like he doesn’t care while he cares all too much.

A part of him hates himself for it. A part of himself stares into buildings and eyes the color of the oceans he loves and waits for an answer. The universe is good at that, asking questions and then answering them ironically. He finds none, however. None for a while.

He thinks he’ll find one the night Armin invites over a friend, interactions dipping further and further past the point of no return until they collide with a crashing of lips. Why do you care so much when you shouldn’t? he asks as his skin crawls, his own lips bitten to hell as he hears Armin’s voice, whispering his friend’s name and wishing among every star in every galaxy that it were his own instead.

The universe answers ironically.

 _Maybe you’re growing too old for this_.

* * *

He deludes himself when Armin begins to speak to nothing by pretending he’s speaking to him.

Armin will sit on the edge of his bed, legs swinging aimlessly as he talks about everything and nothing. The sea’s his favorite topic, but he likes stars. Automobiles. Fashion. Existing. Armin will talk like he has an audience, hands waving and laughing like someone’s responded, but he never responds. He’s responded once, and it ended in disaster, so he would rather not press the kiss of death upon him just yet.

He thinks about the fact that’ll he have to pass along the message of Armin’s death one day and shudders.  
He folds over in his chair, arms touching his sleeves, quietly consumed by something he thinks is called despair (but it’s been years, and it’s been centuries since he was mortal, so is it surprising he forgot). The quiet grows oppresive, its gentle hands snaking around his throat like it’s preparing to squeeze when Armin speaks from below.

“Nah,” he says, gaze seemingly on the ceiling but just a little too off. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

His breath hitches, but Armin moves a hand and a phone is revealed, and the air stops pressing down upon him.

* * *

It becomes a pattern.

Of breathless moments as Armin focuses on something a little too intensely, says words that mirror his thoughts a little too exactly, and of relief when it’s realized he’s not speaking to him.

At first, he can lie to himself and say its pure coincidence.

But then Armin makes an off-handed comment to no one about how he likes amber eyes, and he’s frozen. He hasn’t looked at his eyes in years but he remembers. Embedded into his heart is the word used to describe them, a postcard kind of detail if he could be read.

He shoves the panic away with a hand to his chest and the reassuring that it’s a common color, and just to soothe his nerves he pans over a little to Armin’s left, at a coffee shop with bright yellow awnings and a tall, gangly boy sitting at an outside table sketching, something he intends to showcase by the look of the signature already on the page. _Bertholdt Fubar_ , it reads, and _lack of self-worth and starry nights_ he reads. He stares further into Bertholdt’s soul, picking apart words and phrases until he finds a mention of his eye color.

The hands return to his neck.

Bertholdt’s eyes are green.

* * *

It's the first time in years that Jean feels blind.

He's missing something, clearly, blind to something clear as day before him but he keeps skipping over it, keeps passing it. He can't watch Armin forever (already he watches too much, the messages slowly building up as he forgets to send them by), but every hour is plagued by the thought of _what_ , _who_ , and _why_.

_What is he missing?_

_Who is Armin?_

_Why does he care?_

He asks himself the last question even though he knows the answer. He likes to pretend he doesn't. It's been long enough that he can laugh at the notion of knowing, laugh at his age and pat himself on the back for being above mortality.

He can keep up this charade until his eyes wander back to its usual place, and then his flimsy excuses crumble into dust again, broken up by the weight of truth like lies always eventually are.

It's on another night when Bertholdt's over that Jean plays a game. He pulls in a favor and gives himself a break from watching everything to only watch one, intensely, and see just how far he can keep from cracking. How far will he observe before his little web of lies comes crashing back down again.

So he watches.

He watches as Bertholdt reads a story aloud to Armin, who lies on the other's knees with his hair fanned behind his back. No longer does he look at lives and wishes he were a part of them again, but he looks at the two of them and aches for it. A heart that beats because it needs to, not because it's to humor him, a laugh truly directed at him, Armin's sweet words and even sweeter gazes meant for him and truly meant for him, not just beause he's deluded and wants to believe they are.

Armin reaches up to rub Bertholdt's arm while he stutters over a passage. "You're doing fine," he whispers, so low even he hardly catches it.

He does. And it's a slow kind of death for someone who never really died.

Hour one passes bitterly.

 

Bertholdt's moved from the book to the screen, entertaining Armin by handing over a sleek black rectangle and telling him to watch whatever he'd like. Armin's still in his stretched-out position, except sometime between now and the faint moment he closed his eyes Armin retrieved a pair of sleek black glasses and wears them. He's reminded of the boy with the freckles again, or more specifically his mother, who wore frames similar to those and looked beautiful when she removed them.

Even when she cried over her son.

Their conversations are sparse and oddly empty for a pair that's supposedly close, he notes. If he moves a bit to his right, he'll see a pair who talk constantly but never run out of things to say. She with brown hair and a spirit that shouldn't be so hardened but is, and he with gold eyes and too few people left who love him, are always in some kind of conversation when he glances them over.

If Armin and Bertholdt speak, it's little things, and he wonders how they connect.

Hour two passes pensively.

 

Armin's fingers eventually lapse back into their old game of roaming, and Bertholdt eventually stops pretending he's unaffected. Dread creeps into his bones because here is his moment of reckoning, here is where he bets all of his chips.

He hates the way Armin sounds. The way he cups Bertholdt's face in his face and murmurs his name, voice dripping with so much affection it spills. It forms a puddle. It drowns him. It's not that Bertholdt cares for Armin that hurts, it's that Armin cares back, but what does he expect from someone so warm?

Then why does he think of him and feel so cold.

Armin pulls himself up and slides into the space between Bertholdt's legs, and he snaps his gaze up towards the ceiling.

It's painted to resemble a sky.

The irony.

 

Hour three passes numbly.

 

Bertholdt falls asleep soon after the start of hour four, and Armin entertains himself for a while by kissing the other's lips, stirring him partially and then ducking out of sight. It's cute, he finds himself thinking, biting back the desire to dip into wistful memories. He'll surely fall apart then - and he's done so well - and Jean still has cards to play.

He's not done with pretend just yet.

Armin grows tired of this, presses a final kiss to Bertholdt's forehead and makes his way back into the apartment's only bedroom. His. A bedroom of simple beige walls and white trimming but framed with ocean-colored curtains and brightened with a bed covered in pillows. He knows Armin's room now better than his own, which only exists as a formality. He's never even been in it, now that he thinks about it.

Armin is half-way into the room, closing the door behind him, when a word appears. When Armin becomes, for the first time, readable. It's only one word. Five letters long. But he practically throws himself closer, boring his gaze into it, absorbing it.

He shatters inside when it sinks in.

It's a word he hasn't seen in so long. It's a word he never thought he'd see again. It's one that he's buried, not embedded, and one he never thought he'd bring to surface again.

He hears Armin, but does not see him. Hears his laughter as the door closes and the world stills, like it does when things that are not supposed to be there are. Things he cannot predict or see cause disaster after all, things that are too old for even his centuries to recall.

Though, in this case, while he couldn't predict this he sees it. Still burned into his eyes like the laughter burned into his ears.

Armin is back in his usual place, lying prone on his bed. His eyes are alight with the same childish wonder that takes him when he talks about the sea, the color of the sea itself, and they tip back, gazing a little too far into nothing and finding something.

Armin stares right at him. While he doesn't speak aloud, his mouth moves, forming only two words but far too many, and one that no mortal should know.

"Hello, Jehan," Armin says.

And suddenly, he is tired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright so  
> explaining this clusterfuck.
> 
> Basically Jean is a Watcher of Worlds, someone who observes the planet and takes note of its life. The "messages" he talks about sending are to other immortal beings, like Death, which pop up on his hologram much like an IM.  
> He's basically this giant spherical room with holographic screens around him - he sits in the middle. He can highlight an area and zoom in it to see things like buildings, individual people, etc., but normally it looks very much like a map does.  
> He's not the only Watcher either, especially not for Earth because -- six billion people and all.
> 
> Jean talks about a former life because he once was a normal person - when he was young he got into an accident and nearly died, and a spirit (one of the "older" things Jean mentioned) gave him eternal life. He was made a Watcher because of that. 
> 
> Jehan IS Jean, but it's an older form of Jean's name and the one he was born with, but as the years passed and time changed, he eventually became more accustomed to Jean instead. In fact, the name Jehan is practically no longer used, not even to Jean himself, except by one of the older spirits who remember that name.
> 
> Like Armin, who is one of them. These spirits are not supposed to be on Earth, as their immortality and abilities can wreck havoc on mortals if they so choose. Jean watches out for humanity simply for research purposes, yes, but also for them. While spirits are hard to detect unless they want to be seen or are weakened to the point where they can't disguise themselves anymore, he tries.
> 
> He's SUPPOSED to go down and remove them if he locates one, and by remove I mean utterly erase from existence, which is why Armin BEING one complicates matters. A lot.
> 
> ... I told you this was a weird AU.  
> Honestly I don't even think /I/ explained it properly but --  
> c'est la vie.
> 
> (I do hope it was still enjoyable and SORRY, sorry it was so long oh my god.)


	3. succorance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love soulmate AUs.  
> This is the first of many I assure you.   
> THIS particular one is where you find your soulmate through your dreams, although it's been known to be faulty (some people will dream of a person who's already dead, for example.)
> 
> Sorry this one is so short - and... /not fluffy like it was supposed to be/.

**succorance**

adjective

 

dependence; especially : a dependence on or an active seeking for nurturant care

* * *

 

Eren supposes he’s a little dependent on his dreams.

Reality is the same old, same old slug of day-to-day activities, getting from one to the next, coping. It’s the same three people and the same suburban streets. and Eren can no longer pretend he isn’t tired of it.

Faces he doesn’t bother to recognize asking about him and his father, refusing to let an old wound heal because they want to extend their sympathy. A town that’s so dull it lingers on the only exciting things that happen, even if decades have passed. A sun that sets and rises in the exact same way - Eren lives in monotony that only changes if he makes it so.

With Mako, there’s never anything monotony.

Or, he thinks his name is Mako. It was mumbled with a blush stained on his freckled cheeks by a boy of ten with a lisp - and Eren’s never asked again. In the seven years the dreams have persisted Eren’s never corrected the mistake in his own name either; Mako holds the first syllable a little too long. But it’s fine. Mako’s his reprieve after all, and he can forgive a transgression so simple for someone so crucial.

It dawns on Eren, slowly, that this is pathetic.

He moves through his days with the spaced-out consciousness of a dreamer, makes it through mornings so he can hurry into his bed, climb in and maybe see him, maybe not be alone. He has a life - school, friends, a coveted position on the soccer team but he finds himself no longer caring. Any life he lives when the sun touches the sky is practically worthless to him now, and the only one worth living to him vanishes the moment he opens his eyes.

It’s on the night before he turns eighteen, awoken from a dream with lips still on his and sheets tangled around his legs. He tries to hours to go back, but he’s far too restless, plagued by the realization that sweeps over him and simply won’t leave.

He’s grown far too attached to a person that may not even exist. He needs someone who may not even be real.

(When the clock ticks midnight he admits he might be in love, and that worsens it all the more.)


End file.
